Important note about open sourcing the VidiX plugin

The VidiX plugin has been open sourced in September 2023, and it became an integral part of the Revive Adserver software.

Read the full announcement.

Adding a Skip button to the video player during ad playback

Introduction

This page explains and demonstrates how you can display a Skip button in the video player of your choice during the playback of a pre-roll video ad.

Version 1.6.0 and above

This documentation page applies to version 1.6.0 and higher of the VidiX plugin. If you’ve purchased a VidiX license in the past and wish to update, please contact us to arrange for the formalities to be taken care of.

Background information

The VidiX Advanced Video Ads Plugin extends and enhances the Revive Adserver software to make it compliant with the VAST2 protocol as published by the IAB. VAST stands for Video Ad Serving Template, and the 2 refers to version 2 of this standard. VAST2 has been around for a long time, and it is much appreciated because it provides compatibility with any other software element (like a video player, or another video ad server) that’s also VAST2 compliant.

One common request that we’ve received over the years, is the ability to get the video player to display a Skip button after a number of seconds, similar to what you often see on YouTube or other video services for example. However, this Skip feature has only been introduced with version 3 of the VAST protocol, shorthand VAST3. Not much else of VAST3 ever became very popular.

Implementing Skip

To meet this need, version 1.6.0 and higher of the VidiX plugin offers a very basic but still highly versatile optional parameter that enables the user to add a Skip feature to the video ad playout.

Here is an example of the basic video ad tag supported by VidiX:

https://some.domain.tld/www/delivery/fc.php?script=apVideo:vast2&zoneid=x

To force a skip button to be displayed after N seconds on every video ad delivered via this tag, all that’s needed is to add this optional parameter to the tag:

&skipoffset=N

Where N is the number of seconds that must expire before the video player displays and enables the skip button.

Here is an example of the same video ad tag, now with a skip offset of 5 seconds: 

https://some.domain.tld/www/delivery/fc.php?script=apVideo:vast2&zoneid=x&skipoffset=5

Notes & Limitations

Please keep in mind that adding the skip offset of N seconds to the video ad tag will mean that every video ad delivered via this tag will have the same skip offset duration, this can not be influenced for an individual video ad.

Also note that this is not a full implementation of the VAST3 protocol, and that the addition of the skip offset should be considered an experimental feature.

Video players may not be able to correctly interpret this, since it is technically a violation of the VAST2 protocol. Some video players may not even show the skip button at all.

The Revive Adserver software will not log and report the Skip event in the video ad statistics.